Mask alarm: “In the sea they are more than jellyfish”

2 ‘reading

The first signal came from the pelican, that is, a sweeper that cleans the water of the port of Ancona from land. While in Venice the cloister produced videos of visitors enthusiastic about the transparent waters of the canals (this is a normal phenomenon, but don’t tell tourists), in Ancona the pelican began to extract the celestinian masks that floated on the wire of the water of the port. of the current one and Rodolfo Giampieri, president of the Port Authority, had to take note of the “increasingly massive presence of masks and gloves, until now non-existent”. And from France, the association Opération Mer Propre (Operation Clean Sea) estimated that the sea is populated “more by masks than by jellyfish.”

Here’s the mask alarm. The thick white K95s, the Ffp2s with the ventilation button or the most common very light surgical ones have for months become rude and uncivilized presences in the corners, in the flower beds and even on the beaches. “We are receiving photographs again, especially in the summer centers of abandoned disposable masks”, protests Legambiente Campania.

Incinerate, do not disperse

With the reopening of schools, an estimated 11 million more will be thrown a day – recommend the garbage companies, the experts from Ispra and ISS and the Ministry of the Environment – in unsorted garbage. The masks used go to the generic garbage and not to separate collections, so the final destination is the incinerator, a plant that, from a horrible and polluting monster, becomes hygienic and providential destroyer of contagions.

“Unfortunately, incinerators are not enough, especially in the south where these plants are a rarity – warns Chicco Testa, ecology expert and president of Assoambiente – and consequently a large amount of waste and used sanitary masks are not destroyed but end up in landfills. or worse, dispersed in the environment ».

More than 160 thousand tons

How many masks are produced and thrown away every day?